☕ saturday mornings - December 31, 2022

best of 2022

Tommy Dixon

Dec 31, 2022

Happy Saturday Morning!

I hope you’re having a great start to your weekend and kicking off the New Year on the right foot.

What I’ve been up to:

I've been home celebrating the holidays with family, catching up with friends, and watching Team Canada play in the World Juniors (my favourite holiday tradition).
At the end of every year, I set aside a few hours to review the past year and plan for the one ahead. It's been an immensely helpful exercise. If you're curious you can get the free template I use here.

2022 has been a wild year. 52 newsletter, +50,000 words, and +250 hours of writing

For the final issue of 2022, I wanted to do something a little different. Below are my 5 best ideas from the whole year.

It's a helpful summary of my best thinking, and helps you to catch ideas you missed or refresh on ideas you loved.

My writing has substantially improved this year. I've invested time and money to learn the craft, clarified my thinking, and changed my mind about a lot of things.

I am so thankful to each and every one of you for gifting me with your precious time and attention. I hope that I have been able to bring value to your life in return.

I'm not nearly as good as I'd like to be, but I promise to continue to improve and provide more and more value every Saturday.

Thank you for bringing in your New Year with me 😊

Enjoy!

Today at a Glance:

Idea #1: Avoid No Man’s Land
Idea #2: Stop Consuming News
Idea #3: Give & Takes of Life
Idea #4: Embracing Detours
Idea #5: Anywhere, But Here

💡 Idea from me: Avoid No Man’s Land

No Man’s Land was a term coined in World War 1.

It was the narrow, muddy, treeless stretch of land between German and Allied trenches. No Man’s Land, said poet Wilfred Owen, was “like the face of the moon, chaotic, crater-ridden, uninhabitable, awful, the abode of madness.”

It was the single most dangerous place to be on the battlefront. You were neither behind the safety of your own trenches nor attacking the enemy in their trenches.

No Man’s Land was the last place you wanted to be.

That was 100 years ago. Yet, many of us get caught in our own No Man’s Land.

Facing the inevitable

We all have conflicting wants. Different parts of us want different things.

Tim Urban illustrated these different wants with his Yearnings Octopus.

Each yearning (on each tentacle) is distinct and often in conflict with the other yearnings.

Often, we believe we can meet all our wants. This saves us from having to make difficult decisions about what is important and what isn’t.

Unfortunately, it’s not that easy. Our conflicting wants create pain if we’re not aware of them.

Simple example: In the morning I enjoy time to read and write but I also want to get schoolwork off my plate. Clearly, I can’t do both at the same time.

I can take 3 hours to read and write. Cool. But by making that decision, I’m choosing not to do school work and will therefore have less time for school.

Different parts of me wanted different things. Why do I think I should be able to do both?

It sounds silly. But, before becoming aware of this trade-off, I felt like I was psychologically stubbing my toe every morning.

The Danger of No Man’s Land

For years, I did everything to avoid prioritizing my wants and making difficult decisions.

Here’s the problem: You can’t satisfy conflicting wants at the same time. When you try to do both, you do neither.

I remember taking my laptop to my living room and trying to study for a midterm while hanging out with friends. I didn’t decide which was more important: quality friend time or a good grade.

The result? Half studying, half talking to friends. I was distracted enough by friends to not get any good studying done but was focused on studying enough to not enjoy the company of my friends.

By trying to do both, I failed at both.

The Niche-Slapping Fallacy, used in the start-up world, is the belief that “if I pursue all of them one of them will work out”. It’s a fallacy because it’s wrong. In reality, all of them could work out… but none of them will work out if you pursue them all.

These decisions show up all the time.

Do you want to save money or enjoy the convenience of take-out?
Do you want to make a good investment or buy your dream home?
Do you want to be a responsive partner or be 100% focused at work?
Do you want to get promoted quickly or have weekends off to relax?

When you set your mind to something, you can have it. But you can’t do everything. You have to pick.

You want really good grades? Cool. You can certainly do it. But you can’t beat yourself up for not having a ton of friend time. You decided that good grades are more important than social time.

When you dissect your wants and accept that decisions have trade-offs, it removes the pain from the decisions you make. We become consciously aware of what we’re choosing and we understand the inevitable sacrifices it entails.

This change of scope has been the single biggest positive change in my thinking this year.

Avoiding No-Man’s Land

Through untangling our wants, like the tentacles of an octopus, we gain clarity and confidence in the decisions we make.

Define your priorities. Note the trade-offs in each decision you make. Then own your choices.

When faced with conflicting wants I ask myself: “What is the ultimate thing I’m trying to achieve?”

Once I define what is most important, I’m able to accept the inevitable tradeoffs of my actions with clear eyes.

In my case, I value reading and writing more than schoolwork. Through this realization, I didn’t become frustrated if I fell behind on schoolwork. It was a consequence of my choice.

The trade-offs become less painful. It becomes part of getting what you want. Part of the deal.

You’ll avoid the dangerous place of indecision, where you try to do two things and end up doing neither.

You’ll avoid the bombshells and carnage of No-Man’s Land.

💡 Idea from me: Stop Consuming News

"The goal of media is to make every problem, your problem."
— Naval Ravikant

In 2022 I stopped reading the news.

As I don’t have social media, I’m 99% disconnected from current events.

According to my friends, I’m “living under a rock.” (Their words not mine).

I understand that many people believe it’s important to keep up to date with current affairs. If that belief serves you, by all means, continue.

But, cutting out news has helped me reclaim my attention, improved the quality of information I consume, made me more optimistic, and reduced stress.

The Danger of the News

"The measure of a commercially successful newspaper is not simply how well it reports the big events, but what it does when there are no dying statesmen, bloodthirsty desperadoes, or heinous crimes to write about.
Hearst succeeded in New York not only because he knew how to report the big stories, but because he was a master at constructing news from nothing."
— The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst

“If you diet, invest, and think according to what the "news" advocates, you'll end up nutritionally, financially, and morally bankrupt.”
— Naval Ravikant

We consume news because we want to be informed. Yet, the news doesn’t aim to make us informed. The news aims to make us inflamed.

Incentives are misaligned.

News stations are profit-seeking like any other company.

If you’re not paying for news, advertisers are. No different from HBO, news companies get paid by selling people’s attention to advertisers.

The media is paid to get your attention. The viewer is not the customer, they’re the product.

In this game, views become the focus. More eyeballs mean more revenue. Incentives change. To increase views, as Shane Parrish writes, “the more controversy, the more share-ability, the more enraged you become, the better”.

A journalist, exposing what makes something newsworthy, explained how news stations manipulate information to make it more interesting.

News stations think through:

How do we make something odd or unusual or bizarre?
How do we add conflict?
How do we make something more local to people?
How do we make it more recent?

There’s a formula for what creates news.

The news perpetuates a culture of “tune in, don’t miss out, someone knows something you don’t, follow this or you’ll be misinformed, oh wait, look at this!”

Their intention is to keep attention. Not to disseminate truth.

Your Information Diet Matters

“To find quality information, you have to rebel against the incentives of mass media.”
— David Perell

Like food, you should be hyper-conscious of what you put in your mind.

Information and food consumption are perfect metaphors. You want to consume more nutrients and less junk.

David Perell tells a story of a time he hopped into an Uber with friends and watched them scroll their social media feeds with ferocious intensity. “One thing stuck out”, David writes, “the people in front of me only consumed content created within the last 24 hours... Like hamsters running on a wheel, we live in an endless cycle of ephemeral content consumption. A merry-go-round that spins faster and faster but barely goes anywhere.”

How can the best information to consume all be created in the past 24 hours?

It isn’t.

“News is, by definition, something that doesn’t last,” Shane Parrish explains. “It exists for only a moment before it changes.”

It’s not relevant in the long run. As a result, you spend time filling your head with ideas that were written hastily and expire quickly.

“To be completely cured of newspapers,” Nassim Taleb writes, “spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers.”

To get healthier, improve your diet. To get smarter, improve your information diet.

Cutting Out the News

“Most of what you read online today is pointless.
It’s not important to living a good life. It’s not going to help you make better decisions. It’s not going to help you understand the world. It’s not dense with information. It’s not going to help you develop deep and meaningful connections with the people around you.”
— Shane Parrish

For years, I was a news junkie. I spent hours every day reading the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Bloomberg... The list goes on.

Then I began to notice something. My idols—Tim Ferriss, Naval Ravikant, Alex Hormozi, David Perell, and Shane Parrish—avoided the news like the plague.

They were extremely selective about their information diet.

“I never watch the news,” Ferriss writes, “and have bought one single newspaper in the last five years.”

"[The media’s] intention is not to educate me their intention is to make the world's problems my problem” Alex Hormozi notes, “and I have enough problems and so I don't need to add more that are irrelevant to me to my list.”

Shane Parrish hates the news more than Tom hates Jerry.

Here’s the kicker: They all run multi-million dollar businesses and are prolific business people.

In 2021 I weaned myself down to reading The Morning Brew for five minutes each day. Then, I decided to stop reading any news while I was vacationing in Costa Rica and didn’t miss it at all.

The news didn’t add value to my life, but it certainly could make it worse.

Burying my head in the sand? Perhaps. But I can’t control any of it. Why would I voluntarily add stress to my life over things I can’t control?

On his deathbed, Hans Rosling wrote Factfulness a book on how we’re misled by the news. “It turns out that the world, for all its imperfections,” Hans writes, “is in a much better state than we might think.”

The media cherry-picks the top 0.1% of the worst things that happen in the entire world and force-feeds it to the masses every day. They ignore the bright spots and the improvements and the optimism. It doesn’t sell. It’s no wonder the world seems like it’s getting worse.

I decided I don’t have to subscribe to it.

Where do we go from here?

“Rarely do we stop to ask ourselves questions about the media we consume: Is this good for me? Is this dense with detailed information? Is this important? Is this going to stand the test of time? Is the person writing someone who is well informed on the issue?”
— Shane Parrish

The scary thing about the modern media environment: You only realize how much noise it was making until you turn it off.

In my experience, avoiding news means avoiding spikes of stress over things I can’t control.

I replaced news with timeless content. I’ve returned to old books like Meditations, old ideas like desire, and old writers like Cervantes.

My information diet improved and with it my thinking, decision-making, and relationships.

“Few things are as important to your quality of life," Winifred Gallagher writes, “as your choices about how to spend the precious resource of your free time.”

💡 Idea from me: Give & Takes

My return trip from Vienna to Toronto was quite the melodrama.

My train to Prague to catch a flight was 30 minutes late. But, I breezed through security at the airport.
My flight to London was over 1 hour late. But, I quickly connected to my flight to Toronto.
I was stuck on the plane after landing in Toronto for 1 hour. But, I still made the train to get home on time.

Travel, like life, is a series of gives and takes. Some things will go your way, and some won't. In the end, it usually balances out and you get where you need to go.

If you get caught up in the short term, each road bump feels fatal. Emotions rise.

We extrapolate minor setbacks into trends. Getting turned down from one job interview turns into: “I’m never going to get a job… I’m fooling myself thinking things will work out for me. Who am I kidding?”

It makes things much more painful than necessary.

In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius reminds himself “the fact that my son is sick - that I can see. But “that he might die of it,” no. Stick with first impressions. Don’t extrapolate.”

If you can think long-term, you can put road bumps into perspective. You can trust that life ebbs and flows - gives and takes.

You still get where you need to go, but with less upset, less pain, and less suffering.

Asked what advice he would give to his 20-year-old self Naval Ravikant replied he would tell himself “do everything you were going to do, but with less angst, less suffering, less emotion. Everything takes time.”

If you asked me today, “what is the number one thing you’re working on?”, my answer would be simple: thinking long-term.

Note: If you’ve enjoyed this piece, read my best essay of 2022 on this idea here.

💡 Idea from me: Embracing Detours

Kevin Kelly, perhaps the world's most interesting man, shared 103 pieces of life advice on his blog.

One stuck out:

Ask anyone you admire: Their lucky breaks happened on a detour from their main goal.
So embrace detours. Life is not a straight line for anyone.

We tend to create detailed goals and set thoughtful plans for our future. But, our plans can get derailed when they clash with the chaos of reality. The stubbornness of real life, to follow your plans, becomes extremely frustrating and borderline demoralizing.

But, planning isn’t the problem. Our expectations around planning are.

In the words of the meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein, “a plan is just a thought”.

But, we treat our plans like “a lasso, thrown from the present around the future, to bring it under our command.” We become married to our plans, and shift from “this is how things could be” to “this is how things must be”.

One lesson I’ve learned this year: Sometimes, you need life to save you from getting what you want.

As I read Tribe of Mentors, there was one theme across all the ultra-successful people interviewed: They faced crushing short-term failures that set them up for their biggest long-term successes.

The message: Be careful labeling anything as a "failure". Many failures are necessary course corrections before we strike it big.

Jeff Bezos was a “failed” investment banker which led him to look at launching a little business selling books using the Internet called Amazon.

Susan Cain, an author of several best-sellers, was a “failed” Wall Street lawyer. She admits, "If I had “succeeded” at making partner, right on schedule, I might still be miserably negotiating corporate transactions 16 hours a day." Cain was distraught at the time, but it forced her to step back from law and rediscover her love for writing.

Naval Ravikant puts it succinctly:

"I'm lucky that I didn't get everything I wanted in my life, or I'd be happy with my first good job, my college sweetheart, my college town.
Sometimes you need to allow life to save you from getting what you want."

In the big picture of our lives, we really don't know whether a particular failure is actually helping or hurting us.

This theme reappeared at the European Innovation Academy I attended in Portugal. Many speakers, all highly successful entrepreneurs, expressed how non-linear and unpredictable their life path has been. They couldn’t have planned it if they tried.

I have a tendency to make detailed plans for my ideal future and fall in love with them. But, things would take a complete left turn and I would struggle to cope with the shattering of my planned reality.

But who am I to dictate how the future should unfold? What do I know?

Who says we even want our current plans for the future to come to fruition?

If I found a magic genie 3 years ago that guaranteed my plans would come true, I’d now be stuck on a life path I no longer want.

Make plans but build in flexibility. Prepare to take detours in stride. Take pressure off yourself to figure everything out this instant.

Leave yourself space to reinvent yourself and re-engineer your goals.

“The wise man,” according to the Tao Te Ching, “is like a tree that bends instead of breaking in the wind, or water that flows around obstacles in its path.”

Remember: Sometimes, life has a plan you can’t see yet.

There’s a certain innate beauty in accepting you have little control over the future... but still trusting things will work out. Even if you don’t know how.

A while ago, I reached out to a mentor to ask him about crucible decisions he'd made in his life. He smirked and said slyly, "It helps to have goals, but looking back you'll find your life was a series of lucky accidents".

Life is not a straight line. Embrace detours.

Things will work out. I promise.

💡 Idea from me: Anywhere, But Here

Accommodations of Desire, 1929 - Salvador Dali — Accommodations of Desire (Salvador Dali)

This August I had an eye-opening epiphany: There seems to be a deep-rooted human desire to be somewhere we're not. A need to be"anywhere, but here."

It shows up everywhere.

Living in Canada for most of my life, I dreamt of traveling across Europe, imagining the delicious joy it would bring. In 2022, I spent 26 weeks abroad, but half the time I missed the familiarity and comfort of home. Nearly everyone I met in hostels, even in renowned cities like Rome, Prague, or Vienna, would babble about all the places they want to visit next, despite the grandiosity of the place they're in.

City slickers visit small towns and ache at how picturesque it would be to live there, while the townsfolk are scratching and clawing to escape.

Single people are lonely and crave the warmth of a relationship, while those in relationships desperately miss the freedom of being single.

The masses crave the luxury and opulence of money, while the rich complain, burdened by meaninglessness and shackled by golden chains.

The young desire the stability and resources maturity brings, while the old yearn for the vitality and opportunity youth delivers.

Someone on Twitter wrote: "my investment banking and consulting friends complain they work too much and can’t find meaning, my software engineering friends complain they work too little and can’t find meaning."

Peter Thiel was on track to become a lawyer, working for a prestigious law firm in New York City where the hours were long and the competition was cutthroat. He recounts, "On the outside, everybody wanted to get in. On the inside, everybody wanted to get out."

When I had a straightforward career path, I missed the coming-of-age experience of "figuring my life out". Now my career path is less predictable, I long for the certainty of what I once had.

Each of these cases doesn't apply to everyone. But, most people have experienced at least one.

There's an annoying cliché that, "we want what we don't have". But, it's more than that. You could nearly say: "we want the opposite of what we have".

Why? I have no clue. (If I did, I'd probably be rich and wouldn't walk places to avoid a $2 bus fare).

But, clearly, the result is harmful: instead of enjoying what we already have, we spend our life trying to get things we don't have, in the belief that once we have them, we will be happy and search no further.

How do we course correct?

As far as I can tell, books, YouTube videos, and a stern "talking to" won't help. We ignore second-hand instruction. We only learn by first-hand experience.

I have a friend. Let's call him Jeff. A few years ago, Jeff had a good job but desperately wanted to break into the finance industry, for all the wrong reasons. He glorified the 80-hour weeks, fancy lunches, and gargantuan bonuses. A mutual friend came to me, worried Jeff was losing sight of himself. No matter what he said, Jeff wouldn't listen. Jeff was convinced a job in finance was the missing piece of his life. Eventually, he got the investing job he wanted. Within days, reality hit him like a brick wall. Within weeks, he wanted out, aching for evenings with friends and weekends with family.

This is the closest I can come to an explanation: We create ideals of the things we don't have. They seem perfect in our minds - the jagged edges are smoothed over and glowing with magnificence. But, because we haven't experienced them, they lack detail. But, reality has a surprising amount of detail.

When we forget the detail, we completely miss what that thing is actually like. We don't consider the lower back pain as we sit at our desk for the 14th hour, the steel springs that poke into our side in a hostel bed, and the headache of having our new $120k Corvette scratched.

No books or lectures or podcasts can supplement the amount of detail reality has.

This isn't to say we shouldn't want things. We're biological creatures, evolutionary hard-wired to want things. But, we need to be careful of what we want.

Our desires are the axiom of our suffering; be thoughtful of what you're willing to suffer for. Perhaps, as I realized, you don't have it as bad as you thought.

In 2023, instead of wanting to be "anywhere, but here", I want to think: "I'd rather be here, than anywhere".

Reply YES to this email, and I’ll send you 1 updated & revised idea from 2022 on handling information overload that just missed the cut.